


Runaway

by ladyshadowdrake



Category: All for the Game Trilogy
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 02:40:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1881999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyshadowdrake/pseuds/ladyshadowdrake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the All for the Game Trilogy (The Foxhole Court). Andrew has an unexpected talent and Neil makes the mistake of calling attention to himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Runaway

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The first book of the source material for this fanfiction, The Foxhole Court, is available free through various ebook venues (i.e. Kindle). Please check it out.  
> 2\. A review for the All for the Game Trilogy is included before this fanfiction. I highly advise that you read the book before reading this piece, or it might not make a ton of sense.  
> 3\. The writing of this fanfiction has been approved by the wonderfully tolerant author of the All for the Game trilogy, Nora Sakavic. You can find her blog at: Courting Madness: http://courtingmadness.blogspot.com/

The clang of the athlete’s entrance to Foxhole Stadium echoed off the dark hallway. Neil let Aaron and Nicky pass him and then fell into line behind Kevin. No one bothered to get the overhead lights for the short trip to the lounge door and the hallway reminded Neil of passing through a dark tunnel at night with only the safety lights to reassure the traveler that they were moving forward at all. The door at the end of the hall opened to the brightly lit and comfortably familiar lounge where they found Andrew sprawled out on the long couch that his group normally occupied, fast asleep. Even unconscious he was not relaxed; he had one foot braced against the floor and one elbow wedged into the backrest. Neil was familiar with the position at a glance – if startled, Andrew would be able to get to his feet in an instant. It was the way Neil slept when he stayed with Coach Wymack. Unconcerned, Nicky and Aaron took their usual chairs on either side of the couch, leaving Kevin and Neil to stare uncertainly at the occupied couch where they generally sat with Andrew, who was arguably just as dangerous asleep as he was awake. The upperclassmen would arrive shortly to appropriate their customary places while they waited on Wymack with the details of their next game. 

Kevin glanced speculatively at the couch where Matt normally sat between Renee and Dan, and then at the chair that Allison would now occupy alone. He apparently decided that risking death by a suddenly awakened Andrew was preferable to sharing space with the upperclassmen. Kevin folded himself to the floor in the middle of the couch with athletic grace, tucking one knee up to his chest and resting his scarred left hand across the top of it. He flexed his fingers slowly, entranced by the scars and not paying a moment's attention to Neil, still standing at the edge of the carpet uncertainly. Neil didn't feel particularly confident putting himself either at Andrew's head or his feet. Both options seemed like a prime way to get himself injured when Andrew eventually woke up, and he didn't like having people out of his line of sight; sitting next to Kevin on the floor would put either Aaron or Nicky completely out of view and block the doorway unless he leaned forward. 

“Stop hovering. You're making me nervous,” Nicky said finally, half an octave away from whining. Neil stepped behind Nicky's chair and leaned against the wall as the only safe alternative that let him keep the whole room in sight. Nicky twisted around to look up at him. “Like _that_ makes me feel better.” 

“Deal with it,” Neil answered easily and the older man huffed, then twisted in the chair so he would be able to see Neil in his peripheral vision. His cellphone came out a moment later and silence fell over the lounge, punctuated only by the taptaptapclick of Nicky's fingers on the touch screen. Neil's fingers itched for his racquet and he was irritated by the delay. They could easily be running drills while they waited for Coach and the upperclassmen. Neil watched Kevin instead. The champion was an enigma. On the court, he was a king – nothing could touch him, no one could push him, and he was ruthless to the point of being abusive. Off the court, he seemed to just... disappear. Watching Kevin without a racquet was like looking at an empty Kevin suit. He simply deflated, dull eyed and lackluster, as if his spirit remained locked on the court while his body was away, impatient and demanding his return. Neil understood that kind of emptiness. Hadn't he experienced it for eight years on the run, where the only safe place was remembering his little league games, the weight of a racquet in his hands, the crack of a ricochet? 

The outside door slammed open. A moment later Renee and Dan came through the lounge door with Matt on their heels. Renee had a section of her short white hair pinned up with a pink beret so that a one inch-long stripe of lemon yellow rested on her cheek and the rest was pushed behind her ears. Allison was missing from the group, but Neil noted this only clinically so he could keep a portion of his attention on the door. Matt tossed himself onto the open couch in an easy sprawl and Neil frowned at him- he carried a shiny new acoustic guitar by the neck and had a neon green pick between his lips. Dan slipped in against his left side, twisting around the neck of the guitar and molding herself to his back. Renee perched on his opposite side, half leaning on the arm of the couch to give Matt room to position himself over the body of the instrument. 

Uncaring of a sleeping Andrew, Matt started to play. He hit the first chord, made an awkward change to the second, and then badly missed the third. Neil winced and watched uncomfortably while Matt adjusted his hand to play the third chord again and then went back to the beginning. Hit the first, missed the second, started over. Once he made it through the first four chords without missing a fingering, he started to sing softly. Every time he missed a note, he would start over until Neil was ready to hide his ears in a couch cushion even if it meant risking Andrew's unconscious violence to escape. 

“Can you be done now?” Aaron asked grumpily when Matt started over for the sixth time. 

“I'm learning,” Matt answered, not even bothering to look at Aaron as he figured out the fingering for his chord and started yet again. 

Having apparently had enough, Kevin lifted his gaze from the scars on his left hand and glowered at Matt. “This is a waste of your time and talent,” he all but snarled. Kevin didn't realize that he'd inadvertently complimented their backliner, but Matt didn't miss it. He grinned broadly and ducked his head to start for the eighth time. 

“There has to be something more to life than exy, Kevin,” he said around the pick, tapping his fingers over the strings until he thought he had the chords down. 

The look Kevin gave him suggested that he agreed with that statement about as much as he would love finger painting with manure. Neil agreed with Kevin, but he didn’t speak up. Matt dividing his attention any further than it already was between playing a new position, school, and the looming game was unthinkable as far as Neil was concerned. 

“You're off key.” 

Neil jerked in surprise and Kevin nearly jumped out of his skin at the unexpected comment from Andrew, who was still breathing evenly with his eyes closed. If it weren't for his hand shooting out to grab Kevin's shoulder and force him back to the floor, they all might have assumed Andrew was talking in his sleep. Neil moved a little further away from the couch. Apparently having less of a self-preservation instinct, Kevin scooted closer to Andrew and didn't seem to mind the tight grip on his shoulder in the least. 

Matt paused only briefly to toss a glare at Andrew before starting again. “You're off key,” Andrew announced to the room at large, louder this time. Matt ignored him and continued through the section, making it past the first verse for the first time. Once the chorus hit, Neil finally recognized the song and it made his heartbeat flutter. He reached down to clutch at his phone through the pocket of his running pants. How could Matt have known? Of course, he couldn't: Neil's call log still had only two entries and Matt couldn't know, but it was an uncomfortable coincidence. If Matt could just _play_ it, he wouldn't be butchering the song exactly. He had a pleasant voice. It was nothing extraordinary or even unique, but pleasant enough to be passable. 

“You're off key, you're off key, you're off key,” Andrew sing-songed, getting progressively louder until Matt was shouting over him and messing up the chords so badly they weren't even recognizable. He finally stopped on a discordant note and pressed his open hand against the strings to stop the jangling noise. 

“Did you have something to say, Andrew?” Matt asked sourly, glaring at him. 

Opening his eyes, Andrew blinked at Matt as though he'd only just noticed that he wasn't alone in the lounge. “Oh, was that you making that noise? Did you know you were off key?” If it weren't for the vicious smile and it had been anyone but Andrew, it might have been a polite enough comment. 

“Like you could do better?” Dan asked acidly before Matt could get his mouth open to respond. 

Andrew considered this for a moment and then brought his knees up to his chest and bounced off the couch, narrowly missing landing in Kevin's lap. Andrew reached across the coffee table and wrapped a hand around the neck of the guitar. Matt was so startled that he didn't have time to yank it back before Andrew had it out of his lap and was back on the opposite couch. Matt jumped to his feet and Nicky looked worriedly between them 

“Andrew...” Nicky tried, but was drowned out by Matt's bull-like shout. 

“Oh, sit down, I'm not going break it.” Andrew barely looked up at Matt, but his tone ended on a worrisome note that seemed to say _yet_. Matt took an abortive step around the coffee table, but Andrew stopped him with a confident strum of all six stings. He made a little clucking noise and adjusted the fourth string before trying again. 

Apparently satisfied, he jumped right into the same song, fingers stroking easily over the strings. It was startling enough to make Matt sit back down, and everyone except Nicky and Aaron stared at Andrew in open-mouthed shock. And then he began to sing. 

Where Matt's voice had been pleasant, Andrew's was a force of nature. Neil's hand closed on his phone again and he swallowed hard. He'd only heard a brief piece of the song played in the locker room the night Andrew convinced him to keep the cell phone. He knew another portion of it played on Andrew's phone if he received a call from Neil, but he'd never guessed that Andrew had recorded it himself. It didn’t seem possible that such a violently uncaring person could contain so much talent in one small body. More than impossible, it was unfair – he could play his goal at world class levels even when he wasn’t trying, and had other talents besides? Neil watched Andrew's fingers on the strings and tried to imagine what else those small, strong hands might be capable of if pressed. Art? Sculpting? Engineering? Medicine? Andrew’s shockingly clear tenor seemed to suggest that any or all of those possibilities hid just under his skin. 

Andrew's eyes found Neil’s and his mouth curved into a wicked smile around the words while he played, half knowing and half challenging. 

“ _Go ahead tell me your name again..._ ” the song invited and Neil's teeth clenched tighter with each word until he thought he might shatter them in his mouth. His stomach flipped around strangely and he couldn’t figure out why except the vague, paranoid thought that someone else might realize Andrew was taunting him for his made up names – all twenty-two of them, stretching back through Arizona, California, Washington, Canada, Europe, and more besides. All the names he'd sloughed off like dead skin, scattering a thousand could-be's in his wake. 

“ _Go ahead say it, you're leaving -!_ ” Andrew's voice was rough and angry as he pierced Neil with the accusation, and it was finally enough. 

He shouldn't have done it. His mother had beat it into him a thousand times: Don't call attention to himself, don't stand out, don't be memorable in any way. He heard her voice as he pushed away from the wall and joined in on the chorus. His voice was no match for Andrew's – it was barely classifiable as “pleasant,” in fact, but he could hold a tune and stay on key. Andrew's eyes widened a little and he let Neil finish the last chorus alone. Once the song was over, he picked at the strings idly, strumming out a complicated measure of something Spanish, followed by a few lines of a nursery rhyme and then stopped the strings with a little slap. His eyes never left Neil's, and the scrutiny made Neil fiercely uncomfortable. 

“Ah, multitalented Neil, here’s another surprise from you. I'm always so surprised by it,” Andrew mused in German. He grinned at Neil. “When you show me your eyes.” 

Neil flushed and took an uncertain step back, feeling his heart give a painful jerk while something low in his gut urged him to run, run away and never stop, but he clenched his fists and reminded himself that he couldn't be that person any longer. A glance at Kevin's curious face had him taking a slow breath and making the effort to relax. 

Not giving Matt any warning, Andrew tossed the guitar at him. The backliner had to scramble to keep the neck from the industrial carpet, but he couldn't even summon an angry expression as he stared at Andrew over the curve of the guitar. 

“Andrew!” Dan exploded finally. Neil would have thanked her for getting Andrew's attention off of him if he could just get his pulse to slow down enough to free up his throat for breathing. “How did we not know you could do that?” she demanded, sounding almost angry over it. Andrew gave her a pitying look and she amended, “How could we have never _heard_ you do that? You're good – you should be in a band, or recording on YouTube, or-” her expression twisted into something uncomfortable, and seemingly against her will, she finished, “Famous.” 

Andrew laughed. “Dan, oh, Dan. A tortured musician? I couldn't live with myself being such a cliché. Boooring.” He looked down and blinked like he'd never seen Kevin in his life. “Why aren't you on the court?” 

“We're waiting for Coach, Andrew,” Nicky answered before Kevin could decide on how to respond, though his unhappy expression should have been answer enough. 

“Oh,” Andrew answered. He blinked around at the group and then shrugged and fell back against the couch, legs sprawling and arms flopping out into what might have looked like a casual pose to someone who wasn’t used to sleeping like he might have fight off an attack at any moment. Andrew’s eyes slid closed and he appeared to be asleep within moments. 

“... Is he actually out this time?” Matt asked suspiciously. 

“You want to poke him and find out?” Nicky invited. Matt shuddered and shook his head. He cradled the guitar to his chest like a toddler and looked back and forth between his own hand and Andrew’s where it rested innocuously on the back of the couch. 

While Matt was distracted, Dan looked speculatively between Neil and Andrew. “If that had been anyone else, I would have almost called that romantic, except it seemed too angry.” She narrowed her eyes as if trying to puzzle Neil out. Neil turned away to hide the uncomfortable flush climbing slowly up his neck and leaned back against the wall to disguise the retreat. Stupid, so stupid, calling attention to himself. 

Nicky saved him from further scrutiny with a laugh that Renee shared. “I don't think Andrew would know romantic if it bit him on the ass and then politely introduced itself.” He reached up to aim a backhanded tap at Neil's hip, as if Neil could provide some kind of confirmation. Neil brushed him off angrily. He pushed away from the wall after a moment of tense silence. 

“I'm going to change out. If Coach needs me, I'll be on the court.” 

It was all the encouragement Kevin needed, and he was on his feet. Neil tried not to let on that he was irritated at being followed, and just ignored the other man while he lead the way through the hall to the locker room. In turn, Kevin said nothing when Neil grabbed his shirt and chest armor and retreated into a bathroom stall. 

Neil got the door locked before his legs simply stopped supporting him and he fell onto the toilet in a clatter of armor on the tile. He crushed one hand across his mouth and pressed the other into his stomach, sure that he could feel the scars through his clothes, raised and ugly and each one screaming at him in his mother's voice. The sound of tires on wet pavement overwhelmed him, and he remembered the terrifying flight through Germany, he and his mother too exhausted to run one more moment, but staying awake anyways because stopping meant death. They sang themselves hoarse in an effort to keep each other alert: nursery rhymes, pop songs, and teaching songs in Spanish, French, and German. Neil scrabbled at the memory, unable to recall how that one song went in French with the black birds. It seemed suddenly important that he remember it, an unthinkable betrayal that he'd forgotten the way his mother's lips formed the words, the lilt of her accent on each syllable. 

_And I'll take you for who you are_ , Andrew's unbelievably strong voice whispered over the panic and Neil's eyes snapped open. The hiss of tires on pavement vanished in a crackle of flames and the ghost of burning gasoline, and Neil was left shaking in a bathroom stall with his chest armor at his feet. He breathed slowly through his nose until the shape of the scars beneath his clothes resolved into the creases of his tee shirt. 

A sharp rap against the stall door made him jump. “Hurry up!” Kevin snapped and everything was right with the world again. Neil couldn't respond, but Kevin didn't expect him to respond, only to obey. The man stalked out and Neil watched his feet disappear around the corner. He held his hands out and eyed them until they stopped shaking. Once they were steady again, he stood and pulled his shirt over his head to replace it with the chest armor. He gave himself several violent shakes to make sure everything stayed put before picking up his jersey. His thumbs brushed over the edges of the 10 inscribed on the back and his name above it. The name was not the one he was born with, but it was the one he chose. Neil Josten was the first decision he'd made on his own after his mother died, kneeling behind her too-still body and flipping through the half-dozen packets of fake documents stored in the fireproof safe under the back seat. It shouldn’t have been important at the time, just one name out of six, following twenty-two others, but he'd still gone through each packet carefully, shaking, trying to ignore the deafening void created by the absence of her breath. But Neil Josten was significant, and this was the name he fought to hold onto, that he would continue to fight to keep. Andrew wasn't enough to scare him off it, just like Riko wasn't enough to make him run. 

He was just stepping out of the stall when the locker room door slammed into the wall and a heavy fist pounded on it several times. “Josten! Day! Get your asses out here!” 

Neil rounded the corner to Kevin's scowling face, the expression accusing Neil's momentary breakdown of being solely responsible for keeping him off the court. Without a word, Kevin stalked after Wymack's retreating footsteps. Neil took a moment to shuck his running pants and pull his shorts on before following barefoot with his shin guards, socks, and shoes in hand. 

Andrew was awake again, but he didn't even glance at Neil as he came back into the room. His head rolled gently against the back of the couch, his latest dose slowly kicking in and wiping away whatever had happened between them over that guitar. 

“Do you think I call team meetings just for my health?” Wymack demanded hotly when Neil fell onto the couch on Andrew's left. Kevin was already sulking on the other side, eyes locked onto the back wall as though he could see the court through the layers of concrete and paint. 

“No, Coach,” Neil answered when it became apparent the older man expected him to respond. 

“Christ,” Wymack muttered, glaring at him. He grunted in annoyance and launched into a rundown of their next game. Neil listened obediently, but he was uncomfortably aware of Andrew's heat leaching through his thin shorts and he missed most of the meeting anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Q: Where the heck did you get the idea of Andrew with a guitar? 
> 
> A: This idea was pretty random, more a connection of disparate scenes and Pandora than anything carefully planned out. In particular, when reading The Foxhole Court the first time, I really loved the scene with Andrew convincing Neil to keep the cellphone. It was the first time that I got a real ./lightning bolt! That Andrew was a.) human, and b.) capable of empathy, and finally c.) coming to care for (or at least not despise?) Neil. Up to that point, I was really ambivalent about Andrew on the whole.
> 
> My mind snagged onto the mention of the ringtone being an acoustic version of a song, and even then I thought to myself, “Oh, I bet it's Andrew singing!” No idea why, except it suddenly seemed to fit. A couple days later I was on my way to work and Sick Puppies “All the Same” came on my Pandora station, and I started singing along (no doubt scaring all the drivers in passing cars). I've always loved this song for all that I'm not a huge Sick Puppies fan otherwise, but at the line “I don't care but I wouldn't dare to fix the twist in you,” I instantly thought of Andrew and Neil, and when followed up with the lines “Go ahead tell me your name again...”; “Go ahead say it: You're leaving!”; “And I'll take you for who you are/if you take me for everything...” it seemed just way too perfect. These two boys are pretty messed up, but they accept each other with all the fractures, stand fearlessly in the face of situations that would make the average person back away slowly – I love every bit of it and the song fits.
> 
> Is it the song that author would have picked? Probably not, but who knows?
> 
> As a mental exercise, I used to put together “musicals” for characters – if Character A was going to sing to Character B, what would the song be and why does it make sense? It helped me get a better idea of my characters and how they related to each other. Listening to this song, I thought it would be a perfect song to for Andrew to sing to Neil (and, really, for Neil to sing to Andrew). I also noticed that the author, Nora Sakavic, has a thing for playlists. So combining that one little locker room scene with my mental exercise, a perfectly timed song about “runaways,” and the summary note for The Raven King mentioning that Neil gets under Andrew's skin, Andrew singing seemed like a perfectly logical conclusion to me. 
> 
> What do you think? Discussion welcome.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this as a standalone for the moment, though I very likely will expand later. Thanks!


End file.
